1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of electronic documents and more specifically to systems and methods for providing virtual component operation.
2. Description of the Background Art
The advent of the Internet and other network systems provides an opportunity for extending the availability of documentary information. Prior to such systems, maintaining and distributing documents to the general public, interested individuals or others was often awkward, expensive or otherwise difficult. The advent of such systems has instead enabled huge numbers of new and existing documents to be inexpensively posted and maintained for an extended period of time. Recipients may further be notified of the availability of posted documents or simply discover them, and may quickly and easily access posted documents by accessing a Web site, corporate intranet, BBS or other electronic document repository.
Despite improved availability, however, conventional electronic documents—and particularly product literature—offer little advantage over their manual counterparts. Router features are, for example, conventionally presented as individualized paper-like data sheets, e.g., Web pages, Acrobat or other downloadable documents. Unlike prior paper data sheets, the electronic documentation may include hyperlinks linking document sections, and may be searchable using keywords. However, the typically textually presented implementation examples provide little insight as to requirements or impact. Insight must instead be realized by forcing a user to experiment with a user network. Unfortunately, such experimentation may well be time consuming (particularly with users who are non-technical). Interruption of ongoing user network utilization or data loss may also occur during such experimentation. To make matters more difficult, the user must repeatedly redirect his attention between his network operation and displayed or further printed documentation in order to effectuate and observe the example. Worse yet, a user must properly restore his network to its pre-modification condition if he decides not to implement particular modifications, thereby exacerbating the above difficulties.
Accordingly, there is a need for electronic documentation that avoids the problems encountered with prior electronic documentation.